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on-ethics

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On Ethics

stuff On conduct, ideal and otherwise

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article

Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge; nothing changes if free will <em>isn’t</em> real; and the same is true of consciousness. They’re just complicated debates with no real outcomes.

Stupid Questions

article

There are a few questions which, on the surface, seem hugely important. Then, on closer inspection, turn out to be more or less irrelevant. I need a place to write about them, so I thought I’d make it a sort of always-evolving article. So far, I talk about how useless the nature-vs-nurture debate is and how boring the questions of whether free-will is real, and what consciousness might be are.
Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge; nothing changes if free will isn’t real; and the same is true of consciousness. They’re just complicated debates with no real outcomes.
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betterment on-being-fruitful on-ethics on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning thought-architecture

article

Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.

Hydraulic Despotism

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If you control the water, you control the people: Karl Wittfogel’s theory of hydraulic civilisations gives us a tidy little insight I think is worth extracting. Today ‘water’ is many things: water, electricity, social media and it has some interesting implications. There are some better theories to get after this insight of ours, but better doesn’t mean interesting, and none sound nearly as sexy as Hydraulic Despotism. So I’m going to bring it back.
Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.
Check it out

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collective-architecture connection digital-architecture on-being-fruitful on-culture on-ethics on-leadership on-politics-and-power thought-architecture wealth-architecture

article

Vincent’s S-CALM model describes the situational and cognitive factors that undermine ethical behaviour. Mechanistic thinking helps explain how those factors might operate, and thus, where we might intervene on them.

Mechanical Ethics

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Dennis Vincent’s S-CALM model elegantly identifies the factors that lead good people to do bad things. But identifying what goes wrong isn’t quite the same as understanding how to fix it. Here, I show how mechanistic thinking—illustrated by the ETHIC stack—can help us understand the causal plumbing beneath Vincent’s model, turning it from a diagnostic tool into an intervention toolkit.
Vincent’s S-CALM model describes the situational and cognitive factors that undermine ethical behaviour. Mechanistic thinking helps explain how those factors might operate, and thus, where we might intervene on them.
Check it out

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betterment collective-architecture on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

article

I describe five levels that help understand how good people do bad things—neural, cognitive, situational, social, and cultural. Inject some norms into the stack, and you can explain (and predict) moral behaviour.

Navigating Moral Terrain

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I wrote a series of papers on practical ethics. I didn’t really like those articles. It did, hoever, inspire me to write a 35-page treatise on the behavioural science of ethical behaviour. There’s no way you’re going to want to read that, so I made this instead. It’s not actually heaps shorter, but it’s hopefully a bit more readable. Plus, if you like how the water looks, I assure you, it’s plenty deep.
I describe five levels that help understand how good people do bad things—neural, cognitive, situational, social, and cultural. Inject some norms into the stack, and you can explain (and predict) moral behaviour.
Check it out

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betterment on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture

article

To avoid rationalising poor ethical intuitions, we can use three tools to develop our ethical muscles. Sensitising ourselves to the small number of basic ethical motivations and the the mechanisms which allow us ignore them, before asking what a good person would do. It gets us most of the way there.

Practical Ethics

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Most discussions about ethics centre on catastrophic scenarios. Situations where it’d be very difficult to avoid unethical behaviour. These scenarios aren’t really very interesting to me. What the average person probably wants to know is how to avoid the tamer moral lapses we encounter every day. What the average person wants to do is know how to avoid that single decision that might haunt them. So let’s explore a more practical ethics. This is the last in the series—the three hooks for a practical ethic.
To avoid rationalising poor ethical intuitions, we can use three tools to develop our ethical muscles. Sensitising ourselves to the small number of basic ethical motivations and the the mechanisms which allow us ignore them, before asking what a good person would do. It gets us most of the way there.
Check it out

filed under:

betterment on-ethics on-leadership somatic-architecture
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